10 Industries That Changed IoT

The Internet of things is transforming the way we live and work. The Australian portal CIO made an overview of the industries in which IoT-technologies have already made a real breakthrough.

Water Resources Management

The city of Houston, Texas, has recently lost about 57 million cubic meters of water (15% of total consumption) per year due to leaky pipes. The problem inherent in Russian cities is not alien to America. Built-in sensors and intelligent pump control systems have made it possible to better regulate the flow of water and reduce losses.

Energy Saving

The Office of Energy Research and Development of New York announced a new program Real Time Energy Management, which uses sensors, smart meters, and analysis of large data to optimize energy consumption in commercial buildings.

Transportation

One company has won the tender of the US Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, has invested its $ 40 million grant in the deployment of electric stand-alone shuttles for passengers in Columbus, Ohio. Robotic mini buses will be connected to a single center for processing the city’s traffic situation.

Public safety

In Copenhagen, the authorities replaced more than half of the city’s street lamps with energy-saving intelligent LED bulbs. The sensors allow you to automatically adjust the brightness depending on the time of day or the presence of a full moon. Lanterns also increase the brightness when a pedestrian or bicyclist approaches them, as indicated by motion sensors.

Environment

CITISENSE, a consortium of 14 European countries, is deploying a network of “civil observatories” to monitor air quality with wearable sensors. In the future, similar technology can be used for more accurate weather analysis.

Energy Analytics

The New York State Generation Company – NYPA – has connected its infrastructure to analytical software, data from which has been generated by sensors. The program predicts network failures a few weeks before they occur. NYPA also opened the New York Energy Manager (NYEM) network operations center in Albany, which will connect 20,000 state public buildings to the smart grid. The supply of electricity will decrease during periods of low use – weekends, in the evening and during school holidays. In the future, the system may be tied to the number of people in a specific building. According to NYPA, NYEM will save taxpayers more than US $100 million.

Production Monitoring

The American company RasGas, which manages LNG (liquefied natural gas) plants in Qatar, equipped its installations with sensors from GE, which tracked failures in the synchronization of the main units. With their help, they managed to find the cause of the failure – in the finest adjustment of the valve, which saved the company US $8 million.

Agriculture

The company Freight Farms sells vertical gardens, which are located in freight containers. All systems – water supply, Ph soil control, lighting, top dressing and so on – are fully automated thanks to sensors. Moreover, the company offers users the ability to control the yield according to their preferences by changing the input data. For example, increasing the humidity and the Ph level by a certain amount can increase the yield by up to 10%.

Healthcare

Likewise, IoT transforms business models in health care. Aerocrine is a Swedish medical company that makes devices that help doctors diagnose and treat asthma. NIOX MINO and NIOX VERO are similar to the breathalyzer and measure the fraction of expired nitric oxide. It is an important biomarker for inflammation of the respiratory tract. Aerocrine now uses Microsoft Azure Cloud Services to collect telemetry data from computers connected to NIOX MINO devices and then passes this data on for analysis. This helps the sales team to better track device usage and plan marketing.

Consumer goods

The British company Diageo began to use “smart bottles” for its flagship whiskey Johnnie Walker Blue Label. The smart bottle has a printed touch tag with OpenSense technology from Thinfilm Electronics. It allows you to understand if the bottle is open or not. Users can receive personalized messages via NFC ( near field connectivity) if link a smartphone to the label.

Diageo has access to millions of search queries about its brand. Noteworthy, that 50% of them are made from mobile devices a few meters from the bottle on the shelf. The smart bottle is an attempt to facilitate interaction with the client. The touch tag also allows tracking the movement of goods in the supply chain, controlling the authenticity of the product.